In a growing General Contracting firm, the owner often acts as the primary point of contact for subcontractors. When a bid arrives in the owner’s inbox, the most common reaction is to immediately forward it to the estimator, project manager, or office manager with a short note: “Please add this to the Smith project budget.”
On the surface, this is a quick, decisive action. In reality, “The Forward” is an administrative liability that creates a fragmented audit trail and increases the likelihood of human error.
To scale a construction business beyond $1M in revenue, you must move away from person-to-person forwarding and toward a centralized intake system.
When a bid is forwarded from one team member to another, the integrity of the data is immediately put at risk.
Email clients handle attachments differently. Depending on the settings of the sender and the receiver, forwarded attachments can sometimes be “stripped” or replaced with low-resolution versions. More importantly, if the subcontractor sends a revision to the owner, but the owner forgets to forward the new version to the estimator, the budget will be built using obsolete data.
An email thread between a GC and a subcontractor often contains “side-bar” negotiations. “I can do it for $12k if you let me store my materials in the garage.” If the bid is forwarded without that specific context, or if the note is buried in a long thread, the estimator may miss critical scope exclusions or inclusions that impact the final price.
If the estimator needs to clarify a line item, they only have the forwarded email. They don’t have the history of the conversation unless they ask the owner to search their inbox again. This creates a “bottleneck” where the owner becomes a glorified filing clerk for their own team.
Professional firms operate on a “Single Source of Truth” model. The goal is to ensure that the moment a bid enters the company, it lives in a place where everyone who needs it can see it.
Instead of forwarding bids to people, you should forward them to a System.
If you are using manual tools, this means having a shared folder (Dropbox/Drive) where bids are saved immediately. The owner’s role is not to “pass the ball” to the estimator via email, but to “place the ball” in the project folder.
The most effective way to handle bid intake is to use project-specific email addresses.
With Bid Bench, every project you create is assigned a unique email address. Instead of forwarding a bid to your estimator’s personal inbox, you forward it to the project address (e.g., smith-residence@app.bidbench.com).
This change in workflow provides three immediate benefits:
In the event of a dispute—whether with a client over a budget or a sub over a contract—having a centralized repository is your best defense. It provides a clear, unedited history of what was received and when. Relying on a series of forwarded emails across three different personal inboxes makes it nearly impossible to reconstruct an accurate timeline.
Centralizing your bid intake isn’t just about saving time; it’s about protecting the accuracy of your budgets and the sanity of your team.
Stop forwarding. Start centralizing.
Bid Bench makes bid intake effortless by giving every project its own digital inbox. Start your free trial at app.bidbench.com/signup.